1998 in Review: "Rushmore"

"What's the secret, Max?"

The films of Wes Anderson are tightly controlled and meticulously constructed. They center on characters who plan everything down to the last detail, which is another way of saying they are about Anderson himself. He favors symmetry in his compositions. He chooses every prop in every film. Each of his films features a scene of his protagonist walking through their place of work (or school, as it were), while his underlings ask him rapid-fire questions about his project. This motif is an homage to the “What is a director?” scene in Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night. In the Anderson films, it could be a concierge, a scout master, or the head of a high school theater troupe, but they’re all directors. They are beset by challenges and questions, but they’re cool, calm, and in control, at least when they’re working.

What I love about Rushmore, Anderson’s second and best film, is that he’s not entirely in control of it. Yes, it’s about a classic Wes Anderson character, and it has one of those classic Wes Anderson scenes. Max Fischer is a precocious 15-year-old enrolled at a prep school, where he spends all his time on extracurriculars and none of his time on his schoolwork. An early montage—and this film has the best montages—reveals his resume: the Beekeepers Club, the fencing team, the Max Fischer Players, etc. In one scene, we see him walking down the hallway, approving props for his latest play. He’s a director, literally, and while Anderson mostly refuses to psychoanalyze why his characters need to be in control—we never find out what Steve Zissou’s deal is, do we?—he explains it all in Rushmore. Max’s mother died when he was a child, and we understand his constant activity as a way to stave off the darkness, and his crush on the lovely Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams) as a way of filling the maternal absence in his life. 

Don’t get me wrong: I love the control of his later films, but it took me a little while. I needed to watch them a lot to find the emotion bursting through his rigid compositions. Once you get there, you can feel humanity bursting through every frame.  But Rushmore has no placid exterior. It’s warm and alive from the jump. Consider this exchange, which might be my favorite scene in all of cinema:

I can’t quite explain what I love about this. Some combination of Mark Mothersbaugh’s childlike score and the intense, immediately misguided connection between these two kindred spirits. The courage and desperation it takes for Herman Blume (Murray), a fortysomething millionaire, to look into the eyes of a 15-year-old precocious nerd and ask him for the secret to life. Two years before Lost in Translation, Rushmore was the film that launched the second, more dramatic act of Murray’s career, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a miraculous performance, trading on the confidence and smarm that was young Murray’s trademark, but infusing it with middle-aged warmth and humility. Anderson’s dialogue is pitch-perfect, but Murray reveals so much with just an expression.

And as for Max, well, he answers Blume’s question with preternatural confidence: “I don’t know. You’ve just got to find something you love doing and do it forever. And for me that’s going to Rushmore.” The delivery is a little too perfect, isn’t it? A little too much like something a precocious kid would say in a movie—but we accept it anyway because we want to believe it. That’s how he has gotten away with everything in his life, despite poor grades and a complete contempt for authority. Fischer tends towards fantasy, but he believes it so deeply that he can almost seamlessly weave it into his reality. He lives his life like he’s in a movie. Anderson even has him steal a few things from classic films. “Couldn’t we just let me float by, for old times’ sake?” he says to his headmaster, quoting Abe Vigoda in The Godfather. (The headmaster’s response, “Can’t do it, Max,” is a paraphrase of Robert Duvall’s response). Later in the film, when he buys some dynamite,  he gives the same fake address that Val Kilmer’s character does in Michael Mann’s Heat, released just three years earlier. Max uses the lexicon of inner city gangster movies (“I’m gonna pop a cap in his ass”) more than once, and frequently seems to be aping Dirty Harry (“I’ve got one last piece of unfinished business to attend to.”) He’s a cinephile who uses the stuff of cinema in place of genuine human emotion.

I’m not sure anyone else has done with Wes Anderson’s dialogue what Schwartzman accomplishes here. His dialogue is often stilted or non-realistic, but we accept it as part of Anderson’s aesthetic. It’s part of his charm. But Schwartzman makes us feel like it’s a character choice, not the director’s choice. When he doesn’t speak in movie quotes, his dialogue still feels like it has been ripped from a movie, as if there is a film running in Max’s head that no one else can see. It makes for a dynamic tension as the real world encroaches onto the boy.  He imagines himself in a grand romance with Rosemary, probably a French New Wave film. Even when Blume double-crosses him and starts an affair with her, he still knows the dialogue of betrayal (“Sure you didn’t. Next thing you’re gonna tell me you didn’t just come out of her house at two in the morning.”), but when Rosemary actually challenges his fantasy—“How would you describe it to your friends? Would you say that you fingered me? Or maybe I could give you a handjob, would that put an end to all of this?”—it’s agonizingly painful because of how expertly Schwartzman has puffed his character up with fictional notions. It’s the richest, most three-dimensional character in the Anderson oeuvre. 

Maybe I’m not being quite fair to Anderson, but I get the feeling he didn’t do it entirely on purpose. I learned from the research that Anderson shot the Rushmore sequences at his own high school, so it’s hard not to interpret this film as semi-autobiography. It’s his version of Dazed and Confused, American Graffiti, or Lady Bird, a second feature that puts the director’s own high school experience on camera. It’s easy to imagine Anderson reeling from his own trauma—his parents divorced when he was 8—and falling in love with a teacher, immersing himself in French cinema, and putting himself into his art rather than his schoolwork. If you stop and think about it, it’s almost certain that he did.

Watching Rushmore, however, is to feel that Anderson isn’t 100% comfortable with how naked and vulnerable it all is. And why would he be? This is a man—Anderson, Fischer—who retreated into cinema as a means of processing or escaping reality. Things get very real in Rushmore; in fact, its events could easily be made into a melodrama or, perhaps more accurately, a soap opera. But every time they’re about to get too real, Anderson gives us a perfect needle-drop or an all-time movie montage.  Consider the final moments. When Miss Cross worries aloud that Max has been permanently damaged by the preceding events, he smirks, “Nah, I didn’t get hurt too bad,” and signals to the student DJ to put on his jam, “Ooh La La” by The Faces. The song plays on the soundtrack—the film in Max’s head has taken over again—and he and Miss Cross dance off into the sunset. It’s Max and Anderson coming together, ensuring a happy ending for all, turning the movie into reality, or the real world into a movie. At this moment, we can see Wes Anderson oh-so-clearly. He would never let it happen again.